Portobellos are gourmet mushrooms. Right?

Actually…no.

Portobellos are poseurs. They are just your common Agaricus bisporus (button) mushroom with good PR. Who knew?

It turns out that until the 1980s,  those big beefy mushrooms we now call portobellos were the overly-mature culls that more often found their way into the compost pile than onto the dinner plate. Today, those same mushrooms command premium prices–$14 a pound at Amazon Whole Foods right now!

So…what in the heck happened here?

To put it bluntly, elderly common mushrooms got the Cinderella treatment. 

As is true so often in life, timing was everything. In the 1980s, the food world was experiencing an “eat your broccoli” healthy food moment. Seeing that unfold, the mushroom industry seized that moment to introduce the portobello.  To make it happen, marketing experts (Don Draper?) were enlisted to sell the heretofore mushroom discards to the general public as healthful delicacies. Ingenious! No?

Along the way, the mushroom promoters experimented with names: Portobello? Portobella? Portobella? Today, those names are used interchangeably. They also promoted the brown portobellos as a healthier (albeit more earthy-appearing) alternative to the pristine younger white button mushroom strain of Agaricus bisporus that had dominated the market since they were popularized in 18th Century France.

But how? The public had to be sold on the deep musty flavor and scent of the “new” mushrooms. (As mushrooms mature, they lose some of their water content and the flavor of the mushroom intensifies.) The PR men pulled that one off brilliantly. The portobellos were promoted as having a “picked fresh from the forest floor” scent and taste. You’ve gotta respect the sheer chutzpah of that “forrest floor” line! 

The growing health food conscious public (literally) ate it up.  Today, portobello mushrooms make up a substantial part of the billion dollar U.S. mushroom industry. 

I’m a portobello fan. I’m first in line to enjoy a juicy grilled portobello as a main or on a bun. Sometimes, though, I long for preparations that take the mushrooms in new directions. This innovative portobello mushroom recipe, Portobello Mushroom Steaks And Butter Bean Mash, fits that bill perfectly. 

This recipe is adapted from one that appears in Yotam Ottolenghi’s new cookbook, Flavor. The book is excellent and is available on Amazon and in your local bookstores.